CONTRIBUTORS

Celebrity pays very well indeed

Chelsea Clinton speaks in A No Ceilings Conversation at Lower Eastside Girls Club in New York on April 17, 2014.

By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post

Posted July 15, 2014, at 11:15 a.m.

With talons drawn, the media have descended upon Chelsea Clinton. Again.

Not for her frizzy hair, now smoothed with a killer blowout, or for that preteen metal mouth, now braces-free and pearly white.

This time, the attacks are over how much money she makes — for her network television fluff pieces and well-attended gigs on the lecture circuit — despite her stick-thin resume.

“The former First Daughter has never run for office, held a public policy job or done philanthropic work outside her family business,” the New York Daily News sneered. “But that hasn’t stopped the speaking fees from rolling in — along with a reported $600,000 salary as ‘special correspondent’ for NBC News.”

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Likewise, upon learning Clinton Fille pulls in $75,000 per speaking engagement, The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd asked, “Why on earth is she worth that much money? Why, given her dabbling in management consulting, hedge-funding and coattail-riding, is an hour of her time valued at an amount that most Americans her age don’t make in a year?”

To which my reaction is, since when do you need talent or skills to be a well-paid celebrity?

Lest there be any confusion, most compensation — but especially compensation that’s accompanied by a flock of flashbulbs — is determined not by some intrinsic measure of worldly achievement or moral worth but by what the market will bear.

Witness famous-for-being-famous reality star Kim Kardashian.

Kardashian vastly out-earns Clinton and more accomplished public figures, including Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. The new Mrs. Kanye West charges $100,000 per appearance, according to the fine celebrity journalists at OK! Magazine, and no one at those gigs even expects her to deliver prepared remarks on eradicating waterborne illnesses or racial tensions. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if her contracts explicitly forbid such pontification. On several occasions, Kardashian has commanded as much as $500,000 — her reported payout for attending the recent Vienna Opera Ball. It’s not clear what talents Kardashian possesses that make her “worth” $500,000 per appearance, except maybe a talent for identifying people who are willing to pay $500,000 per appearance.

It’s more than that, of course. Hollywood celebrities such as Kardashian — and political personalities such as Clinton or Sarah Palin — can command big appearance fees because the organizations hiring them derive some value from the appearance, too.

Several years ago, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to determine why nightclubs would pay “Jersey Shore” starlet Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi the head-scratchingly high fee of $25,000 merely to drink, dance and socialize for a few hours. It turned out that, once you took into account the extra revenue streams Snooki’s name brought in — from cover charges to bottle service and publicity in glossy magazines — her attendance might actually have been worth several multiples of what she charged clubs.

The exact numbers probably no longer hold up today, since Snooki’s star, if not her tan, has faded in recent years. But the same principles apply to other celebrities and political scions getting big bucks for appearances on TV and red-carpet events.

After all, having a brand name like Chelsea Clinton keynote your conference or college lecture series can attract better attendance, bigger donations and more press coverage. Televising her recognizable visage can likewise draw in valuable eyeballs. The same goes for other politicians’ children, such as Jenna Bush Hager, Meghan McCain and Ron Reagan, who have also been paid contributors for the NBC family of channels. What these political starlets lack in actual journalistic training they make up for in name recognition and precious political connections, both of which — whether fair or not — are highly valuable to broadcast outlets.

Whatever the optics, I don’t begrudge Kardashian or Clinton the money they can make by charging the market rate for their services; I instead blame audiences for endowing these celebrity brands with value and cash-strapped state schools for wasting money on star appearances that could instead be used for scholarships.

If there is any objection I have to Clinton’s speaking gigs, it’s not the size of her paycheck: It’s the possibility her hosts and employers are hiring her in order to buy influence with a possible future president — Clinton Mere — an aspect of Clinton’s lucrative speaking career that, for some reason, has not been emphasized in most media reports. This possibility is particularly troubling given the family’s resistance during the 2008 primaries to releasing information about donations to the Clinton Foundation, where Clinton’s speaking fees reportedly go. When it comes to the Clintons, exposure is easy to come by — transparency, less so.